Valued at over $850 billion. Doesn't everyone love a stock market? OpenAI is one of the world's leading artificial intelligence companies. Yesterday, I sat down with its CFO, a proud Tyrone woman, Sarah Friar, to discuss the AI jobs threat, living in the future, and where we should draw the line with AI use. Now, I did start by asking her how a woman from a small Irish village becomes the CFO of one of the world's most talked-about companies.
It can be a bit of a headscratcher at times. But yes, very proudly born county Tyrone, shout out for the wee village. And you know, I just feel like I came from a community where curiosity mattered. Northern Ireland's always been known for kind of its technical abilities, including all of Ireland, by the way, which I think has stood me in good stead. And I think people, you know, being able to manage relationships, to remember that in the moment sometimes someone isn't going to do something for you immediately and that's not the reason to get to know them. My mom and dad always were big community people and I think that's really stood me in good stead in my career, too.
And the accent's gone. Could the Americans not understand you? So, you had to...
Do you not hear my dropped vowel sounds right now?
It's coming back slowly, is it? [laughter] When you're on the phone, does your husband go, 'Ah, Jesus, what are you saying?'
He knows I'm at home. He hears [laughter] he hears these words.
It can come in. You're here. You're in Dublin. We're all talking about AI and what's going on. Announced 200 new jobs. 570 jobs now in Ireland in your European headquarters. Listen, we know we're a good tax haven. There's a lot of year round here.
It's not just the... No, I wouldn't say tax haven. It's genuinely Ireland has a couple of things going for it. Number one, it tends to lean a lot into innovation and it's very pragmatic about how do you, you know, both invest in innovation and allow it to flourish. We love the people here for all the reasons I just said. They're even better at all of those things than me. We have put an investment into 200 new headcount around FDEs, forward deployed engineers. So, sounds a bit techy, but think of it as the people who are going to take this amazing technology called AI and put it inside of companies to transform them. And we don't want to just go out and hire them off the street today. We do that too, but we want to train up the young people in the universities so that they're actually learning these skills. So, we create a pipeline. So, to me, it was important that it's both about today and who we can hire, but in the future, who are we going to help train?
Okay. Okay. Well, let's talk about that because the Ireland AM audience are getting in contact with us all the time about their children doing their junior cert and leaving cert, and they're hearing AI and they're like, well, what are they going to do? People are talking about trades more and more to make them AI proof. People are worried about their jobs being gone because of AI. What do you say to that?
Yeah. So, I'm the mom of two, well, no longer teenagers. I've got a 21 and a 19-year-old. So, we go through this conversation a lot. Look, first and foremost, technology has always changed jobs, you know, since the dawn of time, actually. I think about like my farming relatives, they wouldn't recognize farming today. And it's not like it went away. It's just been done very differently. So, that's first and foremost, there will be a lot of new jobs created as well as older jobs that will be changed and some jobs will go away, but it's not like it's, you know, we're going to kill all jobs. Certainly. I think secondly what I tell the kids in school going through that university experience, number one, be curious, that's true in life broadly speaking. Number two is try the technology. Like even as the CFO of OpenAI, sometimes I feel left behind. You know, we'll roll out three new products and everybody's talking about them and I'm like, I went away for a week and I don't know, and I can feel that anxiety. And then the minute I start to use it, I'm like, oh, I get it. And you know, the great thing about AI or something like ChatGPT is if you don't quite know what to do, you just ask it. So unlike any other technology we've had before, you can actually ask it how to use itself. Or, you know, take a photograph. You're stuck. Your TV is not working, or I got in a rental car the other day and I couldn't figure out how to turn off one of the beeps.
I took a photograph of the dashboard and said, 'Here's my rental car. What do I do?' I talked to it. I didn't even type it in. And Chat helped me find the way through the settings, turn off the beep so I could drive as a sane person.
I've listened to you so much that you're kind of living in 2030, 2035 because you have to see what's coming down the line. So, do you think that there's a dearth between our old jobs, what they are now that we're looking at, you know, solicitors or paralegals training solicitors, and the new jobs that are coming online? Do you think the new jobs and what they will be, will they come online quickly enough or are we going to see a gap?
So, I think a couple of things. First of all, I think instead of thinking about it as jobs, I think work is changing. Jobs haven't yet changed. And what I mean by that is if you look at like a solopreneur, like a woman who owns her own restaurant, she's the chef, but she's also started to become her own marketer and maybe her own CFO, frankly. So, her job has changed because she's able to do many more things than just be the person creating the food. If you think about inside my finance organization, there are parts of jobs that are absolutely going away and they should because, you know, if your job was to be a reconciliation analyst, what does that actually mean? It meant your job was to go look on our bank statement and say, 'Oh, we're looking for a payment for €200 and I don't see it. Oh, there's two €100s and they look like they came from the same person. Tada. I have reconciled it.' That is not a job someone should do. That is a perfect job for an agent. And then that same reconciliation analyst today can now say, 'Oh, what could I do to improve the cash flow of the company? Like, could we start to think about payment terms, for example?' So you move from like even in finance being a historian to being someone driving insight. So I just think that it's about jobs changing, maybe some parts of jobs going away, but new jobs we don't even know about being created. And you know, again, that's been our world since the dawn of time.
Selling me on an agent. That's what you're doing to me right now. She's a CFO. How is she doing sales as well? With I suppose, with you know, again, OpenAI, all of you, you're in the news so much. And our audience, Ireland AM, they talk about regulation of social media so much. I know you're not a social media company, but they talk about it because they're worried about their children and the harm it's doing to them. We were moving beyond social media to AI now. Would you welcome outside regulation of AI companies, of OpenAI?
Yeah. So, let me take that. But I want to just start on the social media because I view social media as very extractive technology. What I mean by that is the first thing you do when you get on social media is it asks you for something. Usually your who do you know, right? Like put that in because otherwise the network doesn't really work well for you or for them. In AI, it's actually a very giving technology. The first thing you do is ask it a question and it will give you an answer. So I do think the two things are different from a regulation standpoint. Look, we take it very seriously. We do think that Frontier Labs, which OpenAI is one of, should have some sort of global regulatory body, regulatory setup, but we also want to make sure that doesn't dramatically slow down the pace of use. Right? We're sitting here in Europe, here in Ireland today, and Europe is a little bit behind. Actually, if you look in our base at OpenAI, if you look at the top 10% of all the companies we work with, only 10% of them are European. So, you're kind of underweight or not punching at your weight. So, we don't want regulation to become kind of a crutch to not give people the technology.
When you're sitting there, like you see stories about your company every day, like you must see hundreds of stories from all around the world every day, from the Australian government going, 'Maria, we've been hacked.' The chief of the IMF says that AI, she said just this week, AI is going to hit the labor market like a slow-moving tsunami. How do you feel about all these stories? Do you think that the apocalypse narrative that an awful lot of us are looking at is fair? Like obviously you don't think it's fair. What do you make of it? Because I know an awful lot of people that are just plain scared of AI.
Yeah. So I think first of all, you know, sitting in OpenAI, we always lead with our mission, which is AGI for the benefit of humanity. I know that often Silicon Valley companies come and you know, you roll your eyes because we all say we're led by our mission. It's true. It's really true. Internally, if you talk to researchers, they get excited in areas like life sciences with like drug discovery or new materials or how to think about climate change, right, and so on. So the starting point is, do you have a good north star? Because then when the noise is happening around you, you have to kind of play your own game and kind of always run towards that north star. Now on the other side, if we don't have trust with our community, that's not going to allow us to accomplish our mission. So therefore, we can't just ignore when trust is failing around us. And this is where I think it comes back to folks like me. We have to not sell fear, which I think is a terrible sales pitch. You have to sell solutions. So it can be a very specific area. It's like cybersecurity. Let's not tell you, 'Oh my goodness, we're going to bring our model and we're going to find all these holes in your code.' Instead, we're going to say, 'We're going to bring our models and we're going to find your vulnerabilities, but we're going to patch them and we're going to test those, roll them out, and you're going to have a more secure environment.' Similarly, if you're a consumer, we could tell you, 'Oh, you're going to lose your job,' or we could tell you, 'Hey, you could work with a company like Indeed that works with us, and we're going to help you match to a better job for your skill set.' Or, you know, we're going to, if we talk about, you talked about the, you know, the actual trades, you know, areas like being an electrician, being an HVAC, we're going to help train that up because that's part of how we can create compute. So, I think you're better off really trying to bring people along with like, here's the amazing things that could happen. Like hope is a wonderful sales pitch while not being naive or too like, you can't be the eternal optimist. I mean, I'm a CFO at heart. I also need to manage risk and to do it in a really practical, pragmatic way.
I know in one fundraiser of investments you raised $122 billion, which is just insane to me. The Silicon Valley, you're the new celebrities, like your CEO Sam Altman. He's getting the movie treatment in 'Artificial', a movie that's coming out soon. Have you talked about that?
You know, well, first of all, yeah, on the movie front, I'm not even sure I have like time to watch a movie because I'm too busy doing all the other things. I dream about those days. You know, on the movie itself, like it's about a time when I wasn't in the company. Okay. But what I do go back to is, and I haven't seen it so I don't know how they're portraying it, but you know, people like Sam, Greg Brockman, right, our two co-founders, I will tell you like as humans, I interact with them all day every day and they have, you know, they're many things at the same time, but they care about our mission. I find them full of integrity, very trustworthy people I want to work with. I don't want to work with people that I couldn't say that about. You know, we're all human too. Like Sam just became a parent. You know, a year ago he's got a 2-year-old and a four-month-old right now. That really humanizes someone because [laughter] suddenly I'm wondering why he can do like 6 a.m. calls with me because I'm an early bird. And then I'm like, 'Oh, it's because he's got a baby. He didn't go to sleep actually.' And so I think, you know, again, the cult of the celebrity creates this facade. You know, people like you, you're on TV and then behind the scenes, like you're just real life people. And I think we have to give people grace that you're not always perfect, but you're trying your best.
